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[0:06] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Robert W. Schneider and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals: The Podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:21] Robert W. Schneider: Today's episode focuses on chapter 33, the 1987 production of Les Misérables.

[0:28] Robert W. Schneider: And with us today is the author of that chapter, Professor Robert Meffe of San Diego State University.

[0:34] Robert W. Schneider: On Broadway, Professor Meffe was the associate conductor of Little Women and the last six years of Les Miz. He also did keyboards for the 2012 revival of Evita, Newsies, The Phantom of the Opera, Avenue Q, Spelling Bee, Grey Gardens, and Bombay Dreams, and is currently the head of the MFA Musical Theatre Program at San Diego State University.

[0:54] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Meffe, I'm so happy that you could join us today. How are you?

[0:57] Robert Meffe: I'm doing terrific, and it's a real honor and privilege to be here to talk about the show.

[1:03] Robert W. Schneider: And you have such a rich history with it, which I know that we'll be getting into, but my first question for you is why is Les Miz considered to be a key musical?

[1:14] Robert Meffe: Well, it's really interesting. Um when a uh the I I can say personally why I think it's a key musical, and then I'm gonna give it in a broader sense of history. Um why I think Les Miz is a key musical is because I conducted the show over a thousand times, and when I would turn around and and face the crowd, uh at the end of the show, I would see the first three rows of audience members um clearly moved, many crying, and it was uh a powerful force of empathy and strength that gave you know thousands and thousands of people um uh uplifting message to to take home with. Uh, I think this this and then what I but I also want to say that like the on a larger scale, Les Miz has this epic quality to it, which is um it strives it makes us strive for something that is is is almost beyond our reach.

It it pushes us further than we can think, and and we could identify with so many different characters in in the in the musical. So uh it's a key musical because it really uh it was part of this um uh the the late 80s uh in um uh style of musicals that would come over that were were had these grand and and uh uh for lack of a better word, epic themes to them, and they really changed the landscape of musical theater. Uh you can really you could really chart before and after this and how much it's influenced um uh later shows all the way through Wicked and up to the present of shows that rely on this um big epic structure. So I think it's it it's key as a personal level, and it's very key in the historic level too.

[3:02] Robert W. Schneider: And the second question we always ask our contributors is you know, why did you want to do this chapter? But it seems like your personal connection is what gravitated you towards it. Uh let's talk a little bit about this epic uh storytelling, which had not really been seen in Les Miz, and I haven't seen a musical theater prior to Les Miz. In fact, so many musical theater librettos up until Les Miz, uh, usually the time frame that the characters were interacting in was with over a 24 to 48 hour period. Everything was supposed to happen pretty fast. Why is it that Les Miz breaks those sorts of rules?

[3:37] Robert W. Schneider: Which is, hey, it doesn't have to be over 48 hours, it can be over 48 years.

[3:41] Andrew Child: And you don't need, you don't need one story.

[3:44] Robert W. Schneider: We can give you seven different stories.

[3:46] Andrew Child: Why does it break all the rules but still succeed?

[3:50] Robert Meffe: Well, um, just like everything, um nothing is the first time to do anything, right? In in musical theater history, uh different kinds of shows have become very different very popular at different times. So if you look back a hundred a little more than a hundred years ago, excuse me, a little cough here. Uh look back uh a little over a hundred years ago, you've got um operettas coming over from uh in from uh from Europe uh and particularly France and and Austria. And these shows were always set in very fanciful locations, right? They were never set in the present day, they were never set in the present time, and they were never set in the present place. So they were never in you know New York City or London.

They were in, you know, the wilderness in Canada or in the mountaintops of Austria or something like that. And um these shows really influenced a lot of shows uh that came later, like in the 20s, and I probably the one I want to point out is is Showboat, which was the show that kind of break all the rules in 19 in the late 1920s, right? So Showboat is definitely a show that could take place over a long period of history uh and not over 24 hours. And it combines the element of musical theater, right? There's a lot of song and dance, there's Captain Andy and all those things, but then there's this ravenous or uh uh ravishing score um with uh these uh amazing operetta type songs. Now, what happened was that you know in the 1920s, this really became out of favor.

And what became musical theater was just as you said, like a snappy, quick anything goes type type of thing. Like we're gonna take 24 hours on a an ocean liner and see what happens, mix up all these characters and see what happens. And and that kind of started with you know the Princess Theater musicals and went into anything goes and the Rogers and Hart shows and the Gershwin shows, fun, good times. And then, you know, the what they call the neo, I'm going all through musical theater history here, but uh the the neo romantics the when Rogers and Hammerstein came around, you know, it was this great blend of Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote, of course, uh uh Showboat, and then Richard Rogers, who wrote all those 1920 snappy things, and they combined forces and had this combination of operetta and musical theater.

And and yes, all these librettos, you know, were quick stories, you know, Carousel, Oklahoma, um, and all these things take place in in a matter of days or or or weeks. But uh, and then that became the standard. You know, everyone wrote this this thing for you know 1940 to the mid-1980s. So it was a whole generation of people who knew musical theater as such. And so you're right, Les Miz comes around and it takes this epic scale. It's uh over 40 years of a man's life. Um, and uh you know it starts with him getting uh out of a chain gang, uh, ends up with his passing away with with his uh adopted daughter. And it's it's it's quite extraordinary the the length and the number of stories that are all tied together. So it's uh Les Miz is interesting, although and and unique and key, but it doesn't uh come out of the blue, is what I'm trying to say.

[6:59] Robert W. Schneider: Do you think that Les Miz in its epic scope is a product of the 1980s and the other epic media that's occurring around the same time Les Miz uh debuts?

[7:11] Robert Meffe: Uh yeah, there are definitely connections. Uh a lot of things about the 80s are grand in scope, right? It was it was a uh it was a time of relative prosperity uh for people who had money. It wasn't necessarily prosperity for everybody, but it was definitely a period of time for prosperity for people who already had money, uh all of a sudden have a lot more money because of the stock market and real estate and lots of different things. So um there was, you know, in in in media there was uh things were were big, you know, movies were big and theatrical productions were big, and and you know, just in musical theater, sets were big. There were uh crashing chandeliers and uh a uh uh you know uh a tire that rose to heaven and and the the set of Cats.

So and a lot of this had to do with with Cameron Mackintosh's, you know, um finger on the pulse of what was going to sell. So so yes, there was that. But I think that Les Miz is is unique in that in that it um it actually combines uh this French sensibility of of the writers Claude-Michel Schönberg and uh Alain Boublil, who were really operating in, of course, in France at the time, which had very little um cultural connection to musical theater, right? The uh you know Claude-Michel would talk about what musical theater was like in Paris, and he would say it is like a desert, right? He would say that there was nothing like musical theater since the French operettas a hundred years before. And so he was operating on uh like I want to tell this story that is a very French story and very famous French story, but I want to tell it through musical theater, and and it was it was kind of hard to get off the ground for him, and uh it uh it caught on little by little, and he it it was audiences really flocked towards it because it was so different, like the French audiences thought it was just so different.

And then of course Claude Michel was uh introduced. I'm sorry, uh Cameron Mackintosh was introduced to the to the score, and he just thought it would be brilliant to bring it over the channel to to London and premiere at the Shakespeare Company. So it's it's an interesting combination. A lot of people lump together Andrew Lloyd Webber's career with uh Evita and Cats and Um uh Phantom of the Opera and Alain Boublil's career, which of course is Les Miz and Saigon, but but they really come from two separate places, even though they they they kind of landed in London at the same time. They have a very different background, right?

[9:44] Robert Meffe: So Andrew was writing shows in in the early uh early 70s, Superstar debuted in 70 or 71. And you know, he was he wanted to be a pop rock star. It was it was a very very different uh pathway that they had to musical theater. And you know, when you think of Les Miz, one of the shows that I I never really thought of until I started to read your chapter is how did West Side Story of all things influence Les Miz?

[10:12] Robert Meffe: That's really really interesting because um it yeah, Claude Michel and Alain would talk about there that uh there was no you know, that French music original French musical theater was was a desert. There were there were no you know, there was no Rogers and Hart of of Paris, there was no Rogers and Hammerstein, there was no Sigmund Holman of Paris. Um and what they did have was imported, it was uh uh American things, and not even that much, because the audience really wasn't there. The audience was more towards classical opera or ballet, and but there was a niche audience for American-style Broadway musicals. And when West Side Story played Paris, Claude Michel and Alain saw it and were completely blown away because it was unlike anything that they'd ever seen. The combination of telling a story through song and particularly through movement was something that really inspired them to look at the great Victor Hugo novel in a completely different way.

[11:10] Robert W. Schneider: And can we talk a little bit about the concept album? Which is something that has depending on your opinion, has sort of gone away as time has gone on. What exactly was the concept album and how did that influence what Les Miz was going to be?

[11:29] Robert Meffe: Sure. It's really interesting the idea of the concept album. So when in the early 1960s, um recording technology shifted from you know the small single record to the larger LP, right? So remember that you know there were these things called records. Okay, I didn't know if your listeners how old your listeners are, but yeah, so it used to be a single. You would get the Bill Haley's and the Comets single, you'd play it on your record player, and then it was one song, and you could but what happened was they made larger discs. That the the recording technology allowed more music on one vinyl record. So artists, recording artists would would compile uh all of their songs. So they would they would record an album rather than a song.

And soon enough they were recording albums with themes, right? It wasn't just like all of my singles, it was singles with a theme. And the Beatles really took it further as as as they went along, and you can track them. You know, Rubber Soul doesn't necessarily have a theme, but certainly Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has definitely has a theme. It's not necessarily telling a story, but all of the songs are connected in some sort of way. And that became very popular, of course, because if the Beatles do it, then everybody wants to do it. And so, and then it got you know, recording artists the idea of well, why don't we tell a story?

[12:56] Robert Meffe: Like in the same way an opera tells a story through it, and you have to give a lot of credit for Pete Townshend, actually, with his what he called a rock opera, which was a little tongue-in-cheek, but his album in the 1960s, Tommy, was subtitled a rock opera, in which he told a story, you know, of a pinball wizard that goes from the beginning to the end of that story and all these different characters, and it was so that became popular, and you can see other ones like The Wall, right.

[13:29] Robert Meffe: The Pink Floyd's The Wall and things like that, even in the 70s. Now, what happened with um Andeloid Weber got you know was a big fan of The Who in the late 1960s. He wanted to be a rock and roll star, he had a friend, uh Tim Rice, who he was writing lyrics with. They weren't getting real a lot of traction writing top 40 hits. So, and Andrew really wanted to write a musical, and so he wrote this musical for the stage called Jesus Christ Superstar, and he tried to pitch it to people, and people are like, No, we this is not a stage production, and he couldn't get people to produce it. So he and Tim decided to go to a record company and say, Listen, here's a couple songs. Uh I think people will like them on the radio, but this is our album, and he sold it as a concept album.

And so that that first brown album became like the first musical theater uh concept album, which uh which took off, right? And it was one of the best-selling records like of all time in its era, and it was hugely popular in the UK, and also really very popular in the United States. You had the Jesus Christ Superstar song, you know, playing on the radio, and then all of a sudden the theatrical producers started calling, right? They're like, Oh, this should be a stage show. And that's that's what brought the London production of it, and then the sort of ill-advised New York production of it. Uh, but most people knew it actually from the Brown album. Uh so it became this way of getting things out there, right?

So uh Andrew did it again with uh Evita, right? Evita was recorded as which is very funny. Uh he calls it the White Album, um, which is the original concept album of Avita, and there's some insider information. I I was I worked with Andrew on the revival of A Vita, and he would kept referring to the white album, and I was like, What is he like talking about the Beatles? Like, I don't what's what's going on here? And then I realized he was talking about the Avita concept album. I was like, Oh, okay, that's the white album, anyways. That's you can edit that out if you want, but no. No, I think that we got a brown album, we got a white album, we got lots of whole color spectrum here. Um, so anyways, getting back to I I and this is a long-winded answer, but I think it's really interesting because Claude Michel and Alan worked in the recording industry, right?

They were people who were producing records. They were trying to get pop records, and they saw the success of Jesus Christ Superstar. They saw the success of Avita, and they said, Well, we want to tell this this story. We're not getting any traction, you know, writing a musical. So we're gonna record this as as a concept album. And that's how that uh lame is originally started. And it sold in 1980, you said 260,000 copies, uh, which is very impressive. But tell me a little bit more about uh taking this album and then doing a staged concert of it.

[16:25] Robert Meffe: Yeah, well, uh it was uh it was so popular that um that people wanted to see it live. I mean, it's the same thing as like um when Pink Floyd uh wrote The Wall, right? You know, it was a hugely popular album, but then they would go on tour and people would pay lots of money to see this the Pink Floyd doing this live. So it was it was the same sort of thing. They were like, oh, we we should do this live. And the people who had recorded the original album were not, of course, musical theater actors, they were uh the Parisian pop stars uh or pop singers, not necessarily stars. So it was very comfortable for them to do a concert version of the show that they did an album for because it was really like um it was a concert version of the show. So this was not a staged production by any means whatsoever. It it felt like a a rock concert.

[17:17] Robert Meffe: Oh, very much so. And and and and build as such, and the set design was as such, and uh everything was was was like a rock concert. Got it. And now when Cameron Macintosh got involved with this, or he was able to get his hands on a copy of it, uh he was somewhat skeptical, is that correct, of of uh turning this into a theatrical event?

[17:37] Robert Meffe: Yeah, isn't that funny? Yeah, he he he just thought it was too much. Uh and he also thought it was too French.

[17:44] Robert Meffe: Too French. Yes. He just didn't, he didn't really see the universality of the story yet. And I think that oddly enough, like the stuff, the the things that changed about LeMiz when it went from the rock concert in Paris to after the leadership of Trevor Nunn and John Kaird, and particularly writers like Herb Kretzmer, there who was a lyricist who was helping not as much translate as writing new music, new lyrics based on uh Alan's lyrics. Um what happened with that translation was it made the show the universal message that it is today.

[18:29] Robert Meffe: And what is the universality of Le Miz? Well, it it's interesting. Um there are many, many themes about the universality of Le Miz. Uh I think it's about um it's about forgiveness. Um it's interesting what I find different about Le Miz about and almost any other kind of epic show. If you think about you know, epic shows like you know, the Marvel Universe or even The Iliad and the Odyssey or whatever, there's a protagonist who fights against the you know struggles of evil and ultimately prevails at the end. Le Miz is is different in a very key element, which is that Javert is not evil, right? There's nothing evil about Javert. Uh Javert actually is right. All he's doing is doing his job. He is he's there to provide law and order.

There are a set of rules, then if you break these rules, then society will fall apart. There will be chaos and anarchy. And so you have someone who, like Le Miz, uh, I'm sorry, like the character of Jean Valjean and Le Miz, who who is a convict, and he escapes. He, I mean, he's put in jail maybe for trumped up reasons, but he's he's there. He broke a law and he's serving his time. And he stayed 19 years, not because of the loaf of bread, it's because, well, for lack of a better words, he's a pain in the ass, right? He he was he was uh abusive to the guards and he tried to escape and he was always put back in, which is why his original sentence was much shorter than the 19 years he was there.

And and he Valjean continues to break laws as he goes along. Um in the end of the prologue, he tears up his ticket of leave. So what I find the universality of that is that um that some shows you you you want you go to to root for the guy to win over evil. And I think that that is a universal truth, but there's also a universal truth that um good and evil are uh less black and white than you may think.

[20:27] Robert Meffe: There seems to be a lot of advocacy of gray in this in this particular show. Is that correct?

[20:32] Robert Meffe: Yeah, it really is. And it's it's interesting um because uh you know you can a little bit think of this some people have thought about this, uh, is that you can look at it in a biblical sense, right? There's a lot of biblical themes in the show. You know, he prays to God like God is a character in the show. And um a lot of people look at the the difference between Javert and Valjean as uh in in a in a Christianity sense as Javert representing the Old Testament, the you know, law and order, and there must be punishment if you do wrong, to the new testament, which is about forgiveness and about um uh turning the other cheek, and you know, let those among us without sin cast the first stone, or messages of of what's called the New Testament. So there's it doesn't mean that the Old Testament is evil or wrong, it just means that Valjean represents uh a reimagining of what a relationship with God can be.

[21:36] Robert Meffe: And so, and and it's quite personal, right? It's uh God make or Valjean makes a promise to God in the form of uh uh dedicating his life when he he's returned the candlesticks in the opening of the show, and he says that um, you know, I I uh the bishop says these great words, you know, I've bought your soul for God, right? And he, you know, of course, Valjean freaks out and does the uh the soliloquy that ends it, and ends up what he does is he makes a commitment to God, he tears up the ticket of leave and says, you know, I'm gonna devote myself to God and and to doing the right thing, um, which is of course what repels him to take care of Fonteen and Cosette and which repels the rest of the story.

So um what's interesting is that you have these two characters, uh Javert representing the Old Testament and Valjean representing the New Testament in a way, but the only really um, I guess evil person is in the in the character is someone who's not necessarily evil, but someone who is amoral, someone's out completely without morals at all. And of course, that's the key character of Tenardier, right? Tenardier is only out for himself, right? He doesn't, he does good when he when it suits him, and he does bad when it suits him. Like there's there's no difference. He's not evil, he's just amoral.

[22:54] Robert Meffe: And I think it's very interesting that um in the novel and in the play, uh Tenardi is the only one that survives. And you know, and we'll talk a little bit more about the Tenardis in a little bit. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was why Trevor Nunn to uh as a potential director for this piece. Uh he had done Cats, I believe, which is very different from Le Miz. So what was it about him that appealed to Macintosh?

[23:22] Robert Meffe: Well, that it's interesting because uh Katz was really far out of his comfort zone. Uh so Trevor Nunn, of course, is uh was the head of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London for for many many years. So his background is in classical theater, and he directed many, many productions of Shakespeare and other classic uh theater theatrical productions. So it was it was actually um that combination, like it's it's why Cameron turned to Trevor in the first place with Katz. It was a little bit to legitimize what Andrew was trying to do with Katz. I mean, everyone I I mean, not a lot of people know this, but Katz was like going to be dead on arrival in London. Like everyone was making fun of Andrew because he had the success you know before with the Vita, and they're like, What are you doing?

You're writing a show about dancing cats like that will never succeed. And Cameron, you know, bless his heart, had had the uh pulse on what was going to sell, but he needed it to be legitimized in a way, and so he turned to Trevor and his classical background and probably paid him a lot of money, and uh and he's made a lot of money from this, and so he did it again. I mean that that's that's really what what Cameron was doing. He needed to legitimize these things to um to bring in a larger audience. Because if it was just going to be dancing cats, it was going to be a fluff spectacle. But if Trevor was attached to it, you know, people would maybe um you know give it another shot, right?

[24:53] Robert Meffe: And and it's very and and I think that that that was true of actually both cases. I I I think that Trevor's direction of cats is is really underestimated. It it it could have been just a fluffy dance show. Um and he he actually worked some uh some marvelous things in it. I I mean they cat I think cats is underestimated and it gets made fun of all the time, and certainly the last movie doesn't do any favors to it. But um I think what people don't know about cats is how risky it was. You know, it was they were all on the verge of losing everything. You know, Cameron, you know, probably mortgaged his third castle to try to um try to get the money for it. But it was it was very risky for all of them, and uh whether you like cats or not, you almost have to admire the the chutzpah that they had for even trying to put it on stage.

I mean it really paid off in hindsight, you're like, well, of course, they made a lot of money, but it was very difficult. What do you think uh Trevor Nunn and John Kaird's greatest contribution to the development of Le Miz was?

[25:55] Robert Meffe: Well, they made it universal, I think, is is what in in a grand sense what what happened to it. They were very focused on the language because they were you know they're Shakespeare artists and they are you know Shakespeare doesn't have a backing track or songs to go with it. And any time that they they coached the material, it was it was never about how you sounded or what you were singing like or or anything like that.

[26:21] Robert Meffe: It was basically a play, and that's what they brought to it, and that's what they continue to bring to it. I had the fortune of working with both Trevor and John, or at least observed their process when they came back to remount the show when we trimmed the show from like three hours, 20 minutes to a little less than three hours. So they went through with a fine-tooth comb and cut little parts of it so that nothing was gone, but they wanted to get it less than three hours.

[26:54] Robert Meffe: And being in the room with them, was there something that you learned about the show that you had maybe no idea about until they mentioned it? Well, certainly. Yes. I wanted to sit down and write down everything that they said. It was great. It was very difficult because those who know Trevor, Trevor speaks very, very softly. So if you're not within like 10 feet of him, it's almost impossible to understand what he's saying. And of course, I wasn't an actor, I was there just in the rehearsals. I had to really bend my ear to hear what they were saying. But what they were saying was always focused with the text.

[27:34] Robert Meffe: And I'll give you a specific example of this. There's a song, of course, people know "I Dreamed a Dream" and "Time Gone By." John particularly coached the song beautifully with our actress that was doing this. The actress was trying to come up with the words as she went along. So the phrasing of the song was, you know, "I dreamed a dream in time gone by when hopes were high and life worth living." I can't really sing, but that was the way she was phrasing it. And John was, you know, listened to it, and he said, "That's not how Fantine is thinking right now. She's thinking in full thoughts."

[28:14] Robert Meffe: So she's thinking in "I dreamed a dream in time gone by when hope was high and life was living." So the phrasing of it became, "I dreamed a dream in time gone by when hope was high and life worth living." So it was not something that the actress or the character was coming up in fits and starts. It was that she was discovering these new ideas at the end of sentences, and the ideas were much longer. And it actually took, you know, not only about Les Mis, but it actually changed my view of how I phrase coaching musical theater in general.

[28:53] Robert Meffe: Because you see that a lot, you get the like, "I don't know what I'm saying, and I'm gonna do this." And it's not actually true when we speak or when we have ideas, we think about what we're going to say, and then we say the thought completely. There's very little time that we really spend, you know, like I'm doing now, trying to figure out what to say, right? And there is time for that, but that's not how most people are. And it was very moving. It was a really moving time.

[29:22] Robert Meffe: One of the things that I found so fascinating about your chapter, and something I had no idea about until I read your work, which is I think that Les Mis has one of the greatest prologues in musical theater history. And to find out that it was almost an afterthought was stunning to me. Can you tell us a little bit about James Fenton and how all of that came about?

[29:46] Robert Meffe: Oh, sure. That's really interesting. The original rock concert and the album started with Valjean at the factory as being the mayor of the town. And it starts with the story of Valjean and Fantine. And the reason why is because everyone in France knows that John Valjean was in prison for 19 years and met Javert, and everybody knows the prologue to it in Paris, but Cameron was smart enough to know that when we get to England, people aren't necessarily gonna know the backstory of our main character, or even how he met Javert, right?

[30:27] Robert Meffe: So in the original, when you meet Javert, it's in the first confrontation, and people already know the backstory of it. It's a little bit like, you know, when you watch Rogue One or something, you already know, "Oh, that's the Millennium Falcon," right? Like no one needs to tell American audiences that that's the Millennium Falcon, right? And we all cheer when it happens. And if you didn't grow up with Star Wars, you'd have no idea why people were cheering at a big hunk of metal.

[30:57] Robert Meffe: So that was one of James Fenton's contributions. James Fenton was brought on pretty early. He was an Oxford poet and scholar, and again, this idea of Cameron trying to kind of legitimize musical theater to an intellectual level. And so James Fenton was brought in and took many of the themes, the musical themes, right? You hear "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," which is what the bishop sings. He sings "by the passion and the blood." Right, right? So the melody comes from an already written song.

[31:34] Robert Meffe: Of course, that was "Empty Chairs," and lots of different themes that are throughout the show. And then there's some music that is original to it, and they all work together, worked in all these themes, and it serves a bit of an overture, but it tells the backstory of the whole piece. And that was really a big turning point in audiences' understanding of the show. I think that it really took, it was put in late, and it took a big turn, and people really started to connect.

[32:04] Robert Meffe: And again, the universality of that, like not hearing Valjean's promise, this covenant that he makes with God with the bishop, and not seeing the first confrontation between Javert and Valjean at the chain gang. It takes it from a very French thing to something that can be universal. Now, speaking of what we maybe motif is the word that I'm looking for, you know, for a lot of critics, one of the big criticisms of Les Mis was that it sounds so repetitive, which is something that we're okay with in opera, but apparently at this time it screwed up a lot of critics.

[32:45] Robert Meffe: Now, you spent night after night after night after night with this score. Do you feel it's repetitive? And if not, can you explain to critics why they are mishearing what they think they're hearing? That's really interesting. When I was, I'll tell you a story, I was doing this, I forget if it was on the road or for us in New York, I think it was in New York. And if you talk to any pit musician, they'll tell you that after the show, people come down to the pit, and most people are actually very surprised that there are live musicians down there.

[33:15] Robert Meffe: They just figured the music came from a recording or something. So one little boy about 10 years old came over the pit, read left over and saw me playing the keyboard. He said, "Did you play the keyboards in the show?" And I was like, you know, ready for the whole, like, "Oh, I play keyboards too, and I want to be a big star like you." I was all ready for that. And he said, "Don't you ever get sick of going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-di-da-da-da-da?" And I was like, "Oh, thanks. You really made my day."

[33:45] Robert Meffe: So there's a balance. Les Mis definitely uses and reuses themes. But that's on purpose, right? Because you want people to be, particularly with a show that's so text-heavy and is so long. If you have a lot of new music, new material, always introducing new themes, then your eye and your ear focus on trying to understand new music as it comes along. And it's the same way opera does this, like a Wagner opera can be overwhelming, but if you start to hear the motifs again, all of a sudden you have an understanding that something is connected.

[34:30] Robert Meffe: And that's really what they were doing. They wanted people to know the score at the end of their three hours there, not just because they heard it on the record, they wanted to know and understand the score. When Valjean is on his death chair and sings "God on High," everyone knows that is the "Bring Him Home" reprise, you know, in the same way that when Enjolras is exposed after he dies and he's laying on with the red flag draped over him, you hear the same melody with the orchestra coming in. Like it's connected in that way.

[35:06] Robert Meffe: And if critics have a short attention span for this, then I encourage them to write their own shows and have them produced. So I don't think so. The interesting thing about Les Mis though, which is unlike Wagner's opera, is that you can't always find a connection between the use of material. An example is using "Empty Chairs" in as Mary's song and the bishop's song, and to me there's no connection to those two points in the show although it's the same melody. But I think that it's not a question like in Wagner, it's very deliberate, right?

[35:06] Robert Meffe: When he uses a leitmotif or things like that, he's deliberately making a connection between those two things. I don't think it's the case as much in Les Mis. There are exceptions, there are too many exceptions that use it in a way that's not necessarily intentional. I think the intention is to just make sure that we're familiar with it the whole way through.

[36:05] Robert Meffe: And what did Les Mis open the doors for in terms of other musicals that came after it? Well, it really opened the door to shows that don't have a script, right? It was what we call through composed, so there's no dialogue at all in Les Mis. It's not the first one to do this certainly, Jesus Christ Superstar is a through composed musical, but this was a way that dialogue was written in a way that shows up in opera, right?

[36:49] Robert Meffe: There are tunes from Les Mis, of course. There's "I Dreamed a Dream" and "Castle on a Cloud," but then there's whole sections where people are just talking to each other, and instead of talking, it's sung. So that idea of the through sung musical and being able to make money off of a through composed musical was very big. I also think that it made people unafraid to delve into big themes.

[37:14] Robert Meffe: I point to Wicked as something because Wicked has a very grand overarching theme. It has many characters, it follows a lot of different plots and subplots, and has an amazing set and a great visual feast. You know, she comes down on a bubble, right? So I think that the popularity of Les Mis was definitely seminal for the success of later shows.

[37:44] Robert Meffe: And to be clear, we're talking about audience popularity because as you mentioned in your chapter, the original reviews for this were not very good.

[37:54] Robert Meffe: No, no. One of the reviewers said it was the glums. They called it the glums. Why do you think it was so fashionable back then to disparage this show so much? But in popularity terms, it ran for almost 40 years. It ran for shows that got glowing reviews, it ran longer than those.

[38:14] Robert Meffe: Oh, sure. You know, I would love to have a really great answer to that question. But it has historic precedent, right? You know, people walked out of West Side Story and it lost to The Music Man for the best musical of the season. Sunny in the Park with George ran a fraction of the same time as the show that it went up against, which was La Cage aux Folles, right?

[38:46] Robert Meffe: And so there's this, I don't know. I don't know why critics respond to things in different ways than audience members do. I can only say that when you're in the, if you put yourself into the mind of a critic and you put yourself in the mind of an audience member, you're looking for two totally different things. And you have a different criteria and a different rubric for whether you enjoy something or not. You know, a critic sees, you know, 200 shows a year, I don't know how many they see, but they're constantly seeing things so that you want to see something new.

[39:25] Robert Meffe: What you want to see is something, you know, that breaks the mold, something that excites you. You don't want to see something that reminds you of something else. And even if it is well crafted, it doesn't have the same response to a critic than it would to an audience member, who is looking for something else. You know, they're looking to identify with characters, they're looking to be moved, they're looking to be entertained, they're looking for a lot of different things that if you see 200 shows in a year, you've kind of lost your ability to see a show as an audience member. It doesn't make them dumb or not smart or anything, it's just that what they respond to is different than what an audience member responds to. And in this case, it was classic, right? It got terrible reviews, but like the first day it opened, the audience was around the block with what they wanted to see the show. So I wish I could explain that better, Rob, but I can't.

[40:24] Robert W. Schneider: No, I think, I mean, I think you explained it perfectly. I'd never even thought of that before, that they're looking for something that's gonna break the repetition of what they're seeing night after night after night as part of their business. When in your chapter, in addition to forgiveness, which I think is such a beautiful word to describe what goes on in Les Mis, you also thematically discuss love, faith, and sacrifice as recurring themes. Can you tell us a little bit about where you see those themes occurring in Les Mis?

[40:55] Robert Meffe: Yes, love, faith, and sacrifice are crucial to understanding Les Mis. You know, it's interesting because most musicals think about love as like, oh, people will say, "We're in love," or, you know, it's sort of the coy love of a boy and a girl meeting for the first time and what that is. And Les Mis has that as one theme with Marius and Cosette that they kind of fall in love. But that's not the overarching theme of love. You know, it starts, I mean, if you can think about Les Mis starting 19 years before it even starts, Valjean steals the loaf of bread not because he's hungry, right? He steals the loaf of bread because his sister's child is hungry. So the entire, you know, as it were, inciting incident of the story comes from a man who sees his sister's son suffering.

And it's the love for his sister and his love for his sister's son that causes him to break a law, right? And so each time Valjean is faced with a different dilemma, he chooses love. You know, he chooses to make a promise to Fantine on his deathbed to say, "I'm gonna take care of your child no matter what," right? And it involves a lot of sacrifice, right? So this love and sacrifice are not two different things in this story. And in fact, it's almost Victor Hugo saying, "You can't love without sacrifice." Because if love has no sacrifice, then it's easy, right? So when Valjean turns himself in, right, there's a man that is arrested, and Javert and the court think he's Jean Valjean, this person.

Because Valjean is, you know, a creature of the world and loves our fellow man, he can't abide an innocent man suffering in his stead. So even though Valjean has a lot to do, taking care of a child, all these things, he goes to the court and in "Who Am I," the song, reveals his number on his chest as 24601 with that exciting climactic moment. But that's done from love. Like, it's a sacrifice that comes from love. And where faith ties into all of this is that he knows because of this pact that he made with God, that if he trusts love, he will sacrifice, but he will succeed in the end. So that's where these three themes tie together. And almost any, you can point to any of his sort of major dilemmas that he goes through.

You know, the decision to appear in the barricade, for instance, is one of them. You know, he is safe, right? He's not in the barricades, but he goes to the barricades because, you know, Marius is there, and he needs to save Marius because his adopted daughter, Cosette, is in love with him, and he wants to return him to her. And so he risks his life. He dons an officer's uniform, gets through the gate, appears to the revolutionaries, they're about to shoot him because they think he's an officer. He says, "I'm not, you know, I'm one of you guys, you know, why are you here?" I don't know. I'm just here, right? He doesn't reveal the real reason why he's there and ends up taking Marius after the bloody battle.

Marius is still alive, takes him through the sewers at enormous sacrifice. But leading all of that is this faith, you know, the faith that drives him, that he knows that he needs to sacrifice to fulfill this covenant of love that he made.

[45:05] Robert Meffe: And like any successful musical, there tends to be copycats or people that think that maybe this formula might work for them. Such shows that also cover epic themes, such as Martin Guerre or The Pirate Queen, and then in your chapter you mentioned from movies things like Sunset Boulevard or A Tale of Two Cities, did not do as well as Les Mis, even though they're epic in scope. Do you think that there was an ingredient missing from those?

[45:42] Robert Meffe: Yes, there's a whole number of reasons. I have my own thoughts about the success or lesser success of Claude-Michel and Alain's work. And, you know, I'm making trouble for saying this, but I think what the problem was was that Alain decided to write all of his own lyrics in English. And he's a brilliant, brilliant man, and so is Claude-Michel. And there's nothing against that. But what they had was James Fenton and Herb Kretzmer, two masters of the English language who speak English and know English certainly better than you or I do, and certainly better than a non-native speaker, right? So they were able to not translate Alain's words, but translate his ideas. And the ideas were the beauty of it, and that's the genius of Alain Boublil.

But the actual words, if they are roughly translated, you get kind of a Google Translate version of what his ideas are, which, you know, you could have a great idea, but if it's fed through Google Translate, it doesn't have the same impulse. And certainly, like with Miss Saigon, what happened was Alain was originally going to write all the lyrics for that, but then at the end they brought in Richard Maltby Jr. But it wasn't, I don't think it was enough in time. And then all of their other shows, Alain wrote all of the lyrics in English, and they a little bit sound like that. So that's my opinion. And there's also that it's, lightning is hard to strike twice. You know, people are, when they see something new and they see it's awesome and it's great, they don't necessarily want to see, you know, another version of the same thing.

And you have to credit a lot of composers that are writing that are doing lots of different things. I mean, I think about people like Jeanine Tesori, who you just never know which is gonna write next. Is it gonna be Thoroughly Modern Millie? Is it gonna be Caroline, or Change? Is it gonna be Soft Power or is it gonna be Shrek? Like, we don't know. And I love that about her, and I love about that about her career and how successful it's been. But sometimes when, but there's the other thing about, and it's true of, you know, recording artists too. You have a great album, your first album, and then everyone wants to hear more of that, but then they're disappointed when they hear more of that, right?

So are you an artist that keeps doing the same genre, or are you like the Beatles that are like, "Oh, yeah, you like that? We're gonna do something totally different." Yeah, right, and we don't care whether we lose fans or not. So, you know, there are two ways to go with that, and there's certainly a financial pressure to try to replicate what you do. And there's a little bit of like, how dare you do something that, you know, you don't know how to do, like write a very small show or something like that. I think people's talents are hemmed in sometimes when they're successful with their first show at bat.

[48:33] Robert W. Schneider: And my last question for you, Professor Meffe, is you know, you did this show night after night after night, and like any job, I'm sure you can hit a rut at some point. But what song was it that always revitalized you? Or what song got you out of bed to say, "You know what, it's a rough day, but at least I know I get to play, I get to conduct"?

[48:56] Robert Meffe: Right. Okay, that's really interesting. I know exactly what that is, because it's actually the moment, it's a beautiful lyrical moment, it is a beautiful musical moment, and every time I conducted it, and I conducted the show over a thousand times and played it many more times than that, it never ceased to revive my faith in the power of the show. And it's when, at the very end, when Valjean dies and Fantine and Eponine take him to the light, basically. It's a metaphor for going to heaven, of course. And they sing together, and they pick him up out of his chair, and he rises into the great white spotlight, which is where all the people who die at Fantine and Enjolras, that white spotlight hits them, which is of course the metaphor for going to heaven, and they sing the words, "To love another person is to see the face of God."

And that's not the end of the show. It's the end of their life on the stage, and they hold it out in a very long note, this long C which is sort of higher in Valjean's voice, but it's lower in the women's voice, and it's in a unison C, and you really don't know what's going to happen next. And what happens is a common tone modulation, and the ghost of choruses, the entire ensembles behind the scrim, they take that C and change the key to A-flat major, and they sing, "Do you hear the people sing?" And it's a moment of great clarity, and it is what it does, I think, is a microcosm of what Les Mis does best, which is it takes a very personal story about a one-man struggle against great opposition, and it makes it universal.

It takes this one note in one key, and then it brings in the whole chorus. And those chorus members, they speak for all of us. You know, and it's about optimism and it's about hope. And actually the last words of the entire piece aren't words at all. They're just this exclamation of optimism, of hope, you know, tomorrow comes, right? That's how the show ends. So it's, that moment is the one that I look forward to and I know is coming. And it's still very moving to this day.

[51:37] Robert W. Schneider: Thank you so much for such a brilliant answer. Now I want to go and listen to it. Folks, thank you so much for joining us today. Professor Meffe, once again, a fantastic chapter. Thank you so much for so much wonderful insight. Friends, please make sure to purchase a copy of Fifty Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description if you want to learn more about Les Misérables. Please also review the links in the below description. I'm Robert W. Schneider, and thank you so much for listening to Fifty Key Stage Musicals, the podcast.